It’s A Bittersweet Symphony… This Life

Life is looking up. I’m in a phase of being overwhelmed and exhausted on a daily basis, but for a good reason, instead of it being due to stress and emotional pain. I’m not 100%, as I’ve mentioned, but good things are happening and there’s the satisfaction of knowing that I’m slowly, but surely, working to make them happen.

I’m not gonna talk about my Shadows Rise progress just yet (yeah, I know I’m behind on my self-imposed schedule, but that’s okay. I’m okay with that), I’m actually going to make a post on Written In Shadows about it at some point. However, I do want to talk about how I’m personally feeling about it. And overall, I feel pretty good. I feel that the idea is fantastic, the writing right now is solid and with a bit more editing will be fantastic as well, I’m in love with these characters, and the few people I’ve let in on my early drafts seem to be interested in how it develops. I’m incredibly happy about all of that. And I will be releasing it in the next few months if life permits. I’m confident like I’ve never been about anything before.

So that’s the sweet part. Right? Where’s the bitter? Welp… In the back of my mind, mixed up in all these happy writing feels, there’s one persistent thought; my grandpa’s not gonna be around to see it.

Grief isn’t something I wanted to talk about here. I think a person’s grieving process is one of those way-too-personal-for-the-internet things. I know that in this day and age is normal to have no such boundaries, but call me an old-fashioned kinda gal where things like this are concerned. The reason I’m bringing it up is that it’s hard to separate this sense of accomplishment from the fact he’s not here anymore.

What you guys need to understand is that my grandpa was the single most supportive person in my life. He genuinely 100% trusted that if I published my writing people would want to read it and that they would love it. He’s never read any of it and it’s probably not something he’d actually like to read; he wasn’t much for fantasy epics, my grandpa, but he just knew it was great.

The other night I was telling Doom that I have this borderline stupid amount of faith in this story. In the idea that if we can manage to get the writing part down, good things can come of it, for all of us. Because genuinely, I haven’t met one person who read it and didn’t think it was awesome. And trust me, no one would fake the amount of obsessive love some of my friends have demonstrated towards these characters. No one. A lot of my faith stems from that, but most of it… Yeeah.

When I planned for Shadows Rise, I also planned for translating chapters as they’re published and the only reason I planned for that was so that he could experience it with me. I’m still translating it to Portuguese as we go and maybe eventually I’ll find people to translate it into other languages, but he’s not gonna be there to see it.

It doesn’t exactly ruin my joy over this project. It doesn’t even put a tiny dent in it. So don’t worry about that, guys. Still, every little taste of victory from now on might come accompanied by a bitter aftertaste. And… That’s just life, I guess… Ain’t it? 🙂

And well, I’m tired right now; for good reasons, so I’m gonna go watch some YouTube in bed to unwind. I have commissions to finish tomorrow, still.